I thought it would be fun to revisit these 10 reasons I love Yin Yoga using them as prompts to write about from my current understanding and see how the texts/thinking differs.

To that end the text written below are my short takes on the top 10 text in the images (originally written around 2015).

Above is the original cover design and this next image was my summary, back in the day, for Yin Yoga. For the brevity of this post I will save my current summary of Yin Yoga for another day 💫

CONTENTS

| Top 10 Thing I Love About Yin Yoga

1. It Feels Amazing

2. Do It Anywhere

3. It Enhances Meditation

4. It Is Meditation

5. Body Awareness

6. Chi Awareness

7. Yin/Yang Love

8. Kung Fu Roots

9. Different Sense Of Time

10. Different Sense Of Body

1 | It Feels Amazing

Honestly is any reason better than this to love a practice? The best part is that it is true for everyone, it just feels SO DAMN GOOD TO STRETCH!

Whats more is there isn’t even a huge barrier to enter into the practice of Yin Yoga, it adapts to each body, is super chill so even good when yer not feeling like workin out and it gives you all those juicy neurotransmitters that make us feel all tingly and good, EVEN FROM JUST ONE POSE.

2 | Do It Anywhere

Sometimes practices are dependent on some context, you need equipment or space to move around or privacy to not look too insane 😂

But NOT Yin Yoga, this practice is something we kind of do already when we need a little stretch at work in our office chair or when we are getting up in the morning to start our day or waiting for a flight or train at the station.

Once you know some of the basics of the practice its like you have the unlock code for your body and there isn’t much to it surprisingly, if you are in your body you can do Yin Yoga in that moment.

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3 | It Enhances Meditation

I’ve had a meditation practice longer than a formal Yin Yoga practice and I noticed some things when I began practicing Yin Yoga.

For one I started to feel more comfort while sitting in Zazen. This is simply due to starting to feel more comfort in my body in general from Yin practice.

I also found if I did Yin before Zazen it primed my Nervous System to settle my mind/spirit/chi more easily. Conversely if I did Yin after Zazen I recovered from any aches that were caused by the long sittings.

And that is mostly referring to the physical enhancements, there were mental ones as well but that could be an essay in itself.

4 | It Is Meditation

Above I was talking specifically about my Zazen practice as “Meditation”, but there are many forms of meditation and essentially they mostly all have in common a focusing of the mind on a single object.

Guess what practice also focuses the mind on a single object? Yup! its Yin Yoga.

This doesn’t mean you have to be highly mentally focused while practicing Yin, in fact some sessions you may just be zoning out and fully relaxed but part of the methodology we learn to apply in Yin Yoga is to focus on target areas in a pose and release tension that repeatedly returns.

I have even had a student with ADHD once say that Yin Yoga is the only kind of meditative experience he could practice because it gave a physical sensation as an anchor for his mind.

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5 | Body Awareness

As mentioned above you are focusing the mind on the body in Yin Yoga. This can be precise in a meditative sense but it is just the overall thing that happens in Yin Yoga. Remaining aware of, studying and listening to the body is very likely the most important component to a safe & correct practice of Yin Yoga.

Because of this you develop and train a very high degree of awareness of more & more subtle aspects of your bodily experience & perceptions.

I go so far as to say that “Advanced Yin Yoga” is not measured by how flexible a practitioner is but by how attuned they are with their body’s sensations.

6 | Chi Awareness

This is a wonderful extension and/or byproduct of the previous point; when you refine your body awareness to a certain degree you are simply in tune with your Chi.

Chi (or Qi) is essentially sensations that you perceive in/through your body & mind, but at a high enough level that the body and mind become more & more indistinguishable.

I find Yin Yoga is ideal for becoming aware of what Chi is, how to find it, feel it and explore it. There are of course ways to practice Yin Yoga, kind of mindlessly, where you wouldn’t really develop much sense of Chi. However the overarching YINtent (in my opinion, for what its worth 🤷‍♂️ ) is to refine & learn ways to practice and methods to apply that develop a profound understanding of Chi.

I have learned more about Chi from a short time practicing Yin Yoga than I have from decades studying Qi Gong. To that end I consider Yin Yoga a form of Qi Gong, but that is another essay to explore.

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7 | Yin/Yang Love

The philosophy that Yin Yoga is based in is Taoism, which is more commonly known through the terms Yin & Yang.

Ultimately what this practice is all about is balance; finding, maintaining and understanding what balance means in our body and in our life.

The philosophy of Taoism can sometimes seem esoteric or intentionally difficult to understand but it is really quite simple. Essentially it is a way to see and make choices about your life & health through studying this idea of balance.

When do you need to be more active? When do you need to be more chill? What is a feeling of imbalance? What activities will dissolve that feeling of imbalance into one of equanimity?

8 | Kung Fu Roots

I always find it funny when I declare to people that I am more interested in Kung Fu than in Yoga, since I am a Yin YOGA teacher it seems a bit askew hehe. The reason is simply because Martial Arts and Kung Fu have always connected very strongly with some inner part of me.

I, of course, deeply love Yoga in its totality but it was when I read about Yin Yoga being born from Taoism & Kung Fu that I was fully hooked for life in this practice.

If you aren’t familiar with Kung Fu there is often enormous emphasis placed on stretching. This was the case when I trained Shaolin Kung Fu for a short time and was what planted the seeds of Yin Yoga through Monkey Kung Fu Master Paulie Zinc.

Long story short one of the students of Paulie Zinc found their bodily-fascial changes from so much stretching to be fascinating and began exploring it more in their Yogic practices, yadda yadda yadda, Yin Yoga emerged.

9 | Different Sense Of Time

One of the more cool and trippy aspects of practicing Yin Yoga often and deeply is how time itself begins to FEEL different in everyday life.

This sounds a bit woowoo but even Physics talks about the relativity of time and our minds are by no means rock solid reliable time keepers hehe.

There is something about getting into your body, and the pace of Nature, that is very different from our human-society-pacing.

We can revisit Nature’s pacing daily through Yin Yoga. This reconnects us with the inherent Nature found in our body and we begin to slow our mind, dropping into that precious “Rest & Restore” mode of our Nervous System.

Not even to mention all of the chemical and neurotransmitter changes that come about from a practice like Yin Yoga and how profoundly our perceptions shift around those chemicals.

10 | Different Sense Of Body

Putting time aside and speaking of how our body FEELS on a regular basis, I think we often get stuck thinking that what we currently feel is as it always must be 🤷‍♂️ . When in fact we are changing all the time due to chemical/endocrine changes and we have control over this through our various choices.

One big choice we can make regularly is whether we allow tension to remain in our tissues or whether we take time to deeply release it. This isn’t necessarily easy but it can be quite simple and mechanical.

If we do get this tension out regularly it becomes profoundly enlightening as the release starts to accumulate a momentum of relaxation over days, weeks and months of practice.

This “profound enlightenment” comes from the fact that relating to our surrounding environment through a tense body is a diametrically different experience than how we relate to the surrounding environment in a relaxed, fully released body.

The barrier we feel in tension-body is not the same oneness we feel in a released-body. It is game changing and can shift your paradigm once you experience it for the low low price of a little feel good stretching each day 😉

From my heartmind to yours,
Thank You so much for reading,
you mean a lot to me 🙏 ❤️

~ T.J. Maher